My Kingdom For A Wedding Hall (A Groom With A View)

Evin and I live in Brooklyn. We met in Brooklyn. A short film I wrote about how we met was set and shot in Brooklyn.

So we sat at our computers giving The Google quite the workout to find a place for us to get married in our beloved Brooklyn.

The 1st place we found had lots of things going for it. It was located near the water and with sweeping views of Manhattan. My cousin attended a wedding there last year and raved about it. But my cousin is 24 and easily impressed and would’ve raved about a wedding at Denny’s. When we went to Yelp, people wrote nice things about the place. But great reviews on Yelp were always dubious. For all of the positives, the place had a truckload of negatives, too. The room held 500 and we would’ve been swimming in with out puny little wedding of 100. They also had a ridiculous minimum which meant we might end up having to invite 3rd cousins, ex girlfriends and boyfriends, co-workers, and neighbors — both former and current just to pad the list. And to make matters worse, they wanted us to pay for a coat check person (to take the coats of hats for our July wedding?) and, expected us to spring for their bathroom attendants so our guests could have a paper towel and a mint handed to them. No thanks to that and no thanks to the venue.

The huge restaurant in Williamsburg was beautiful. We knew a couple who got married there and they had good things to say about it. The food was terrific, the staff was nice on our Sunday night visit, but they too had a large minimum which was prohibitive. What is it with the large minimums? Plus, the only date they had available was in late August.

Then there was the hip, new hotel-of-the-moment, also in Williamsburg. But they never returned our phone calls. And when we happened to be in their neighborhood and stopped in to ask if we could get a tour, the snooty full of herself front desk clerk told us no one was available to do it. So we left unhappy and disillusioned.

And so we kept looking but ended up being disillusioned with every place we saw. Brooklyn, it appeared, was not to be.

Queens and Staten Island were both out. So we set our sights on Manhattan. Just to kick the tires we called The Pierre Hotel — $575 per person. We’re still laughing about that one.

But we ended up discovering a bunch of great places which we felt might work. So we called them all, made appointments go come visit, and found a rare weekday off to do this. We wished we were done looking but alas, we were not…

Getting married should be about the two of you, but many places just see dollar signs (and minimums), especially in New York City where there’s a lot of money to be vacuumed up. I remember going to a wedding in a hotel ballroom in Orange County where if was such an assembly line you could almost feel the next event waiting outside in the wings.

Luckily New York also has a lot of range and inventive spaces. Hope you and Evin find what you’re looking for! (Do you agree what you’re looking for?)

Escort cards are extremely easy to personalize and an excellent way to bring in your wedding day colors -- from calligraphed seating cards set atop a textured linen to apples tagged with each guest's name or small personalized bundles of lavender tied off with string. Other ways to display escort cards: Pin them to a clothesline, post them on a board covered in color-coordinated ribbon, or incorporate them into your cocktail hour using personalized stirrers tagged with guests' names.